


A Faithful Vixen

by citruses



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cottia is Foxface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Faithful Vixen

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Round One of the 2nd Fanmedia Challenge, over at ninth_eagle on LJ. Inspired by the picture of the berries.
> 
> Note the warning for major character death. Further, Cottia is under 18 in this story, but it does not contain sexual situations.
> 
> A huge thank-you to Seascribe for the beta.

She's small, yeah; she's a small girl. Never took up much room at the solar farm, where her earliest memory is of daddy swinging her up onto his shoulders, her hands in his hair, bright orange like hers; his voice rumbling up to her, his laugh, bright like the sun's reflection off the miles and miles of black panelling. Everything seems to turn darker and greyer after he dies, though maybe it's just one of those growing-up things, like how you get spots and your sweat smells bad and every year you're more and more terrified of the reaping.  
  
She's small, and sometimes she used to punch the boys at school, if they said something; made fun of her hair, or picked on her because she seemed kinda defenceless, or even sometimes if they found some weedy little kid who couldn't fight back she would help him out, though she didn't have friends, not really. She read books, and talked to her mom and her daddy about the farm, yomping around its dusty paths in her little blue boots, and she paid attention in school without standing out for it.  
  
When they leave – the widow and young son moving in with a new lover, sending the daughter off to relatives – she carves her name into one of the trees that shade their house, letting the big curved 'C' envelop the other letters, pushing the kitchen knife deep, a little clumsily. She chose a spot down low near the roots, crouching steady on her haunches with the knife. Maybe nobody will ever see it, but she'll know that it's there.  
  
  
.  
  
  
If she stays in Kaeso's house in the daytime – so expansive, so opulent, so alien even after all these months – she will probably break something, or go mad. Or both. There's a path and a gate at the bottom of the manicured back-garden and there's the parts of town where boys will give you a drink or a crappy black-market cigarette or let you kick a ball around with them if you ignore the shit they say about you when they think you can't hear. She keeps quiet, tries not to hang around with the same people too much, doesn't want to be memorable in case someone realises she's Kaeso's niece and it gets back to him. In the evenings Valaria dresses her up and ferries her to parties parties parties, introduces her with the wrong name, a Capitol name –  _Camilla_  – to rich boys looking for wives, who get bored or angry when she doesn't simper lovingly in their direction.  
  
Sometimes as she's slipping through the gate in the afternoons she sees a dark-haired man in the garden of the house behind Kaeso's; usually there's a wheelchair left a ways behind him, and he seems to walk with difficulty, his face kind of closed-in and grim. She never lets him see her, leaves him in his privacy, slips down the path and out onto the backstreets. He must live, she thinks, with the old man Aquila, who owns the great house that the garden belongs to – but he's never at any of the society parties that her aunt makes her attend.  
  
  
.  
  
  
Valaria wants her to dye her hair mauve, or azure, or tangerine. Cut it diagonally across the forehead; shave one side but keep the other long; have it chemically straightened, like her own, to remove the great soft waves they both inherited – new idea after new idea, like she just has to find the right style and her little Camilla will embrace the Capitol thoroughly. No, aunt, she does not say, as Valaria takes her through perfumed boutiques and cold designer salons, brightly-lit restaurants that serve tiny portions of geometrically presented food. I do not wish to look like you, aping the latest styles of that faraway city which cares not a feather about me. And as if her hair would be the place to start in turning her into the perfect Capitol girl! Her hair, her own hair, with its sheen like the sunset on the dusty red plains, up on the farm. No, no, she will keep it, the bright flowing lines of it, the warm weight down her neck. She will keep it till the last breath leaves her.  
  
  
.  
  
  
The first reaping without her mom feels like the worst thing imaginable. Standing in line with all the others, gut churning, she wonders if they'd call out that other name –  _Camilla_  – and, if they did, whether she could refuse to go with them because of the misnomer, a technicality.  _That's not me. That's not my name._  
  
  
.  
  
  
She makes them promise that she can go back to the country when she turns 18. Maybe she will work on the solar farm her daddy used to own, or maybe there'll be another one and some as-yet unknown cottage on the orange plain, or if nothing so grand at first, then a room in workers' lodgings, with other farm folk like the boys she used to run and knock around with at school. Coarse boys, maybe, and they'd still need punching if they went too far, but honest and simple and hers. Her people.   
  
At nights she lies awake in the huge, hard bed, or sleeps fitfully and dreams she smells the soup on the boil for the third day running, her mom making the chicken-bones last as long as she can; hears the twitter of a bird that's nested in the trees outside the cottage, where she watched it nurse its babies through spring; goes out to pick some herbs from their little kitchen-garden, crushing them between her fingers; finds a wild strawberry and bites into the juicy redness of it.  
  
They will call her by her real name again, when she is eighteen and lives in the country, and she will revel in it, the rustic sound of it that her aunt and uncle hate so much. She'll be her own woman, in whatever she does, and they will call her Cottia.  
  
  
.  
  
  
It's Esca, in the end, who introduces them. She meets Esca on the streets, the one guy she likes enough to get a little bit familiar with, loving the way he projects fuck-you to the world, admiring it, wishing she could tell everyone to  _bugger off_  the way he does, the way he says he told everyone back in District 8 and struck out on his own, but with something in his eyes when he says it like that's not the whole story. She doesn't care, lets him lie or hedge, but then lets him push her when she lies about Kaeso, lets him get at the roots of her and it turns out he knew already. Lives in the house that backs onto Kaeso's with old Aquila and his nephew.  
  
His nephew.  _I think he's an exile,_  Esca says,  _same as we are_. When she and Esca start hanging out in Aquila's garden in the afternoons it isn't long before she meets the man with the limp: Marcus, who is all dark-eyed civility and a quiet, sardonic half-laugh. There's something hard between Esca and Marcus that makes Esca's eyes burn like flames when they look at each other, but they never seem to fight, and she likes Marcus in a different way to how she likes Esca, but just as much. Once, he lends her his coat, which is practical and well-worn and reminds her of her old life, the little blue boots she used to wear around the solar farm, and yeah maybe he reminds her of her daddy a little, though he's only a few years older than her – twenty, same as Esca – and his hair isn't amber-coloured like hers. His voice rumbles through him like daddy's used to.  
  
She kisses him a month later, Esca off somewhere by himself; as he cradles her waist in his big hands and kisses back like a gentleman, she realises that he kisses Esca too – not like this, but with teeth and tongue and grasping at each other like they'll die if they let go. Later, she's halfway through telling Esca what happened when he kisses her, too (not hard, but firm: a purposeful kiss), and then she understands how it will be.  
  
  
.  
  
  
The next year her brother has turned twelve and she catches sight of him across the wide square where the reaping is always held, bused in from her stepfather's home in the shadow of a power plant, one of a great troop of pale, quiet children. His first time. Every so often she hears from Valaria that he's OK, that her mother's well, that the new father-figure is taking care of them both; she watches her little brother line up with a hot pain in her chest, suddenly wanting to gather him in and hold him to her like she used to when she was small and he was a baby, like she hasn't held anyone for years. It's his first time, she thinks, it won't be him, don't let it be him.   
  
It's her.  
  
  
.  
  
  
She sees them both before she gets taken to the Capitol, a snatched moment after Kaeso and Valaria have wept and patted her for their allotted few minutes. They tell her they asked someone to send for her brother, but the bus carrying him home had already left.   
  
For the whole five minutes, she clings to Marcus, feeling undignified and terrified and desperate, while Esca holds her arm hard enough to hurt and talks in a low voice about trusting nobody and staying alive by being careful, fucking promise you'll be careful. He kisses her hard and Marcus runs his hand over her hair in that way he has and none of them says, I love you, and then Marcus and Esca are being ushered out again, looking over their shoulders, brushing hands like they want to cling to each other but daren't. She wipes a hand over her face and looks away.  
  
  
.  
  
  
They called her by her real name, as it happened, and hearing it felt sour for the first time.  
  
  
.  
  
  
Get through things the way you always have, head down, eyes open, don't make friends. She reads up on survival and practices tying herself up trees to sleep and weaving hammocks and how to identify which insects will kill you or bite you or are good to eat. She barely talks, but the other tribute from her district doesn't either; they get to be known for it, the silent twins. Well, if she has to be known for something.  
  
  
.  
  
  
Sometimes, in the arena, she thinks about things: kneading bread on an autumn day with mama, making the dough into mouse shapes with raisins for eyes; her hands clutching daddy's hair as he piggy-backed her around, almost nodding asleep on his back; the sun on legions of solar panels; the tree with her name in it; chasing her brother around the farm and laughing. Kissing Esca, the soft shape of his mouth. Marcus's arms around her.  
  
They're dying out, one by one, and she's being so fucking careful, taking calculated risks, racking her brains for memorised lists of herbs and wildlife and making damn sure nobody's following her.   
  
Early on she decides it's too painful to think about things – about home. Later she decides it's the only thing that will keep her alive, sane.  
  
She hasn't killed anyone yet; wonders when she'll have to. Bide your time, says a voice in her head, sounding both like and unlike her own. Play it right, and you'll only have to do it once.  
  
  
.  
  
  
She's starving and knows it, has to find something to scavenge or steal as soon as possible, body aching and mind ricocheting around itself. Everything feels ten times harder – she can tell she's losing concentration, getting desperate, easier to kill by the hour. The hunger's like torture, aches like an open wound. She tracks the District 12 boy for what feels like days, but it can't be. He must have some food, he must be getting it somewhere, god, please, let him have some food I can take. This hurts so much.  
  
  
.  
  
  
The berries taste sweet.


End file.
